My system is set up with English as the system language but I and other users of the machine use various keyboard layouts within gnome. If a user does "lock screen", they have to type in their password again, and in this dialog they can click on the keyboard indicator to choose which keyboard layout to use when typing in the password. All good, everything works fine. But, in the main login screen (which looks very similar to this picture: http://www.debianadmin.com/images/etchkde/1.png ) there doesn't seem to be a way to choose the keyboard layout. It only accepts passwords if they're given in the qwerty layout. Is this an omission, or is it by design, is there any way to add an option to change the layout or at least an indicator to show what the keyboard layout is?

I realise that at this point there are no users logged in so it would have no idea which layouts to offer as a choice, maybe that's why?

Whether correctly or not, I think of "language" and "locale" as being quite different from keyboard layout. So this computer only has one locale installed, only one language, and all menus, desktops etc are only available in English. Actually if it's not too difficult to install multiple locales and have different users able to log in to desktop using different languages, then I might try that in future, but that's a question for another thread, for now just assume that all users only have English and that's the only locale installed.

In answer to your question, when I click on "Language", it offers to select the language for the following X session. Because only one locale is installed, it only gives the choice between "system default" and "english". So this has no effect. But I don't want to change the language, I just want to have an indicator what the current keyboard layout is. Ideally a control to let me switch but just an indicator would be good.